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America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

motherjones.com

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Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#71

Post by anigbrowl »

LiveTheDream wrote: post #3
anigbrowl wrote: post #2

Mother Jones would have you believe that this is some great new breakthrough, but every paint shop or home center I've been in within the last 10 years, as well as many DIY product packages/instruction sheets has prominent warnings about the dangers of lead and information on how to safely mitigate it. Maybe it's just because I live in California, but you'd have to put your head under a rock to remain unaware of the…

I didn't get that sense at all. The article acknowledges multiple times that this is not a new breakthrough. The point is that the danger of lead is so well known that it's strange criminologists don't make a bigger deal of the lead/crime correlation. More recent studies show the lead is even more dangerous than previously thought.

But criminologists do make a big deal of it. Here's a study from 5 years ago, which received wide public attention at the time, pointing out the correlation: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...

And the MJ article spends half the time talking about how economically worthwhile lead abatement measures would be, without bothering to report that lead abatement is already well subsidized and promoted, because policymakers at both the state and federal level are aware of the high long-term costs of childhood lead poisoning; google 'lead abatement site:gov' for an abundance of resources. Those bureaucrats and politicians aren't advising people to clean up lead-based paint and offering grants just to pass the time, they're doing it because they already know about the high social costs of lead contamination. That's also why unleaded gasoline is now the norm.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#72

Post by anigbrowl »

rayiner wrote: post #9
htf wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your profile says you're a lawyer. I have a question for you. Why did they need to ban leaded gasoline specifically? Wasn't it already illegal for anyone to spread poison in the air? Why was new regulation needed? Or, by "regulatory success", do you simply mean the recognition by the government that lead is poisonous?

It's not illegal to spread poison in the air. Every time you drive your car you're spreading harmful chemicals into the air. Every factory or industrial operation spreads harmful chemicals into the air and water. You could theoretically ban pollution. That actually used to be the law in the 1600's. E.g. if you owned land on a river, the water had to leave your property as clean as it came in. As the industrial revolu…

Seconding that Coase paper, which has the bonus of being wholly written in English without any math (which would depend on prior knowledge of economic models). The ideas are further refined in The problem of social cost, a paper published in the same journal a year later: http://home.cerge-ei.cz/ortmann/UpcesCourse/Coase%20-%20The%...

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#73

Post by knowaveragejoe »

sliverstorm wrote: post #23
knowaveragejoe wrote: post #10

I view the drop in crime as the result of a perfect storm of many factors, and perhaps this is another one. The explosion of media and the Internet occurred around the same time, so it's hard to say what caused it.

In 1996, the New York Times reported that crime had plunged for the third straight year, the sharpest drop since the end of Prohibition. Since 1993... Need I remind you that HTML 1.0 was released in mid-1993? The Internet wasn't exploding like you are thinking quite yet. Sure, it was on the rise, but certainly not among the sort of folks breaking windows and selling drugs.

This is true, I didn't mean to imply that the initial drop was caused by the explosion in media. More accurately I believe the continued decline and absence of crime could be attributed to those things.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#74

Post by wissler »

rayiner wrote: post #4

Fun fact: the banning of leaded gasoline was one of the biggest regulatory successes in history, and went a long way to validate the model. The use of leaded gasoline was a classic market failure. It saved a small number of companies a relatively small amount of money, but was on the net a huge negative for the overall economic because it basically pumped lead directly into the bloodstream of children through their l…

It's not a market failure, it's a governmental failure, for this reason: if you spew poison into the atmosphere (it was known long before then that lead was poisonous), you should be expected to have to pay for the damages caused. But these companies knew they could get away with it with impunity, and they did. So, it was a governmental failure in the first place, and failure was piled on failure by not addressing the root cause and by increasing the cost of doing business for everyone just because some criminal company notices that the government won't actually punish them.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#75

Post by tokenadult »

There are a variety of really interesting comments here. Thanks for the pointers to other sources on history and economics besides the interesting magazine article submitted here. Having read the comment threads, I just wanted to respond to a couple of statements about Thomas Midgley, Jr., the chemist who had much to do with developing tetraethyl lead as a gasoline additive and later Freon as a refrigerant. The accusation made against him in those comments is that he was accountable for untold human suffering around the world because of his inventions. But let's remember that during the twentieth century mortality and morbidity from all causes declined throughout the world, and that in the developed world, life expectancy at all ages has been increasing throughout my half-century lifetime to date.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...

Technological progress is all about trade-offs. The trade-off that is beneficial and affordable in one decade may be supplanted by a trade-off that is more affordable and less incidentally harmful in a later decade. Improved transportation by motor vehicle doubtless had many side effects that were beneficial to human health, as did more efficient refrigeration and air-conditioning. On the available evidence, it is at least as likely that Midgley's work was net beneficial for humankind over the course of our parents' lifetimes and our lifetimes as it is that he caused net harm to humankind. We can't rerun history to be sure. Meanwhile, as we discover more about physics, chemistry, human physiology, and also economics and public policy, we can aim to make the best regulatory trade-offs we can in this decade. It's enough to be rational today and to try to improve the living environment for humankind according to our best understanding today. So far progress in improving human health in general has been remarkably steady worldwide for more than a century.

http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#76

Post by Tuna-Fish »

htf wrote: post #22
rayiner wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not illegal to spread poison in the air. Every time you drive your car you're spreading harmful chemicals into the air. Every factory or industrial operation spreads harmful chemicals into the air and water. You could theoretically ban pollution. That actually used to be the law in the 1600's. E.g. if you owned land on a river, the water had to leave your property as clean as it came in. As the industrial revolu…

If I may ask a second question: what do you think of emissions trading as a solution instead of bans on specific sources like leaded gasoline?

I have yet to understand how an emissions trading system is superior to a simple tax paid on all emissions.

Trading schemes add a lot of unnecessary complexity and potential for abuse, and enshrine the idea that if you have polluted more in the past, you deserve to keep polluting more in the future. If your business model requires you to cost the society more in pollution than the value of your product, you should not be in business, regardless of how fine history your company has.

Instead just quantify the total harm caused by emissions the best you can, divide by total emissions amounts, and levy that as a tax per pound of emission. In such a system, not a single coal-fired plant would be in operation in the US.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#77

Post by jkimmel »

colomon wrote: post #61
greendestiny wrote: post #7

I'm tempted to repeat the oft said correlation is not causation. But really I have never thought that captures the problem I have with studies like this. Of course correlation does not necessarily imply causation. What I really find to be problematic is a small time series of data of a facet of a human behaviour across a population is probably going to correlate extremely well to many other time series across the sam…

Yeah, it just feels like the entire article is too convenient. 1) Everything seems to work out perfectly, no matter how it is considered. For instance, if lead contamination in the ground is such a big deal, why does lead in gas track so closely to the crime rate? Wouldn't it be the case that it would track on the upside but not the downside? 2) He keeps on emphasizing lead lowers IQ. But the Flynn Effect suggests th…

As far as the Flynn effect is concerned, it's possible that the benefits of general increases in public health (to which the Flynn effect is oft attributed, though somewhat more controversially in recent years) negated the effects of lead on a large scale. However, this does not mean that the Flynn effect would not have had a greater observable magnitude had lead exposure not been so high.

Part of me agrees with your overall conclusion about the corollary nature of the research as a whole, but those are my two cents on that particular point.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#78

Post by javert »

jere wrote: post #64
javert wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ayn Rand was not a market anarchist, as you seem to be suggesting. Ayn Rand believed that the role of the government should be to protect people from other people. Putting harmful chemicals in the air is no exception, if they are truly harmful (as in this case). People constantly misrepresent Ayn Rand and slander those who agree with her. Please stop.

>Objectivism holds that the only social system which fully recognizes individual rights is capitalism,[72] specifically what Rand described as "full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_(Ayn_Rand)#Politics... And here's a freebie from some googling: >As far as the role of government is concerned, there are laws--some of them passed in the nineteenth cent…

Ayn Rand thought the role of government was to protect individuals from initiating force against one another. Period. If you poison the air in a way that harms someone, that constitutes initiation of force.

She called the economic and political system resulting from this "laissez-faire capitalism," or more commonly just "capitalism."

In context of the partial quote you gave, "unregulated" means "without economic regulations," not "without any laws."

So, that's how you reconcile things.

There is actually no "nuance" here at all; this stuff is all totally "black and white," clear and consistent, in her writing.

You say "I don't hear the same nuance in her followers," but I'm not sure who you're actually referring to here. Objectivists are quite few and far between. For example, most people in the Tea Party who are Atlas Shrugged fans don't actually understand Rand on an intellectual level.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#79

Post by javert »

gpcz wrote: post #65
javert wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ayn Rand was not a market anarchist, as you seem to be suggesting. Ayn Rand believed that the role of the government should be to protect people from other people. Putting harmful chemicals in the air is no exception, if they are truly harmful (as in this case). People constantly misrepresent Ayn Rand and slander those who agree with her. Please stop.

I'm concerned about what level of evidence an Objectivist society would need to pass such a law. According to Chapter 33 of "The Passion of Ayn Rand," Ayn Rand demanded a "rational" explanation of why to stop smoking and said the statistical evidence of the link between smoking and lung cancer wasn't proof. It took an X-ray of her own lung cancer to get her to stop. Since the lead/crime hypothesis bases its conclusio…

She didn't trust the specific evidence presented by the US surgeon general. It wasn't an issue of not trusting any kind of statistical evidence. She was actually very pro-reason, pro-science, etc.

I haven't read that book, but while I'm sure there are many facts in it, the overall tone (and motivation for its writing) is a giant (and dishonest) character assasination. Supposedly this is documented extensively in the book, "The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics" (by James Valiant), though I haven't read that, either.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#80

Post by baddox »

jpdoctor wrote: post #57
baddox wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can use private litigation (sue someone for poisoning you) but that is wholly impractical. I'll never understand how people can suppose that a government solution, which consists of a massive nation-wide bureaucracy as well as an immense violent army of what I endearingly call "the conflict resolvers" (law enforcement, courts, etc.) funded mostly by compulsory financial levies on working residents, is by any de…

> I'll never understand how people can suppose that a government solution,... is by any definition or stretch of the imagination "more efficient" than private litigation. You mean private litigation which employs gov't judges to adjudicate and the gov't police to enforce? If so, you have a confusing definition of private. The only private litigation I'm aware of is the mob, which has a self-contained judgement and en…

> You mean private litigation which employs gov't judges to adjudicate and the gov't police to enforce?

No, I mean private litigation and conflict mediation that is private. There is a lot of that already.

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